Finishing the Race

I cannot believe we are only here for four more days! It's so weird to look back and remember when we first got here and thought five weeks seemed ridiculously long...and now it is only a drop in the bucket and not nearly enough time to do anything! I've been wrestling with God about leaving all of our friends behind and not knowing what is going to happen to them. It is hard to let go of them and trust their future to the Lord. I am thankful for technology because it is so much easier to stay in touch with people with things like Facebook and e-mail. With these tools we can hopefully continue to be a blessing to the students we have met.

Moving on, it's been a really great week since I last updated. I think Tuesday was probably my favorite day, maybe even of the whole trip. Ada and I had an appointment to hang out with our friends Aki and Rurika. We had lunch, ice cream, explored a Japanese garden by Waseda campus and went to Takadanobaba for purikuya. It was really sweet just to spend the day with them and get to know them better. We didn't really get into much spiritual conversation with them but I think it still meant a lot that we invested so much time in building our relationship. Please keep them in your prayers!

That night was the highlight of the day. We hosted a second, larger outreach at the Student Impact student center in Mitaka. About 12 or 13 of our student friends came to hang out with us. We played a couple interactive group games like Human Knot to get everyone up and at 'em. We had initially wanted to serve pizookies (cookie pizzas with ice cream on top) but had no access to an oven. We made do with ovenless cookies and vanilla ice cream. It actually tasted really good I thought! The Student Impact Gospel choir performed a song for us all and one of the JCCC staff Koji gave his testimony in Japanese. Obviously I had no idea what he was saying but people really seemed to appreciate his openness. After that our team did cardboard testimonies. We broke off into groups and talked about the testimonies with the students.

I had a really awesome conversation with a girl named Manami. She is so close to knowing the Lord. She talked about feeling some presence but being scared to label it as God. She asked a lot of solid questions about God, how I became a Christian, how I know God exists, relationships, rules we have as Christians, etc. It was really awesome because she was so interested in everything and really wanted to know the answers. Another guy on our team, Jordan, had an equally sweet conversation with Manami's boyfriend. They are both so close to realizing the truth of the Gospel in their lives! We prayed for them at the train station and I would definitely appreciate your prayers for them in the future.


That's all I've got for right now. God continues to be faithful, as always. And I'm slowly learning to have faith in His faithfulness. I'll post some pictures next time.

Blessings in him!
Psalm 67